January 22, 2012

Summer Dreams, Landscapes and Sketchcrawl

Short and grey winter days in Moscow burst with longing for color and as the result, imagination provides very colorful subjects for painting. I combined watercolor and Neocolor water soluble pastels in the upper one. And found out that these pastels are specially good to mark the details on wet surface.

This Saturday I joined theSketchcrawl group for the first time. The idea was to sketch all day long around the city, changing location and finding interesting details. I was going on for 2 hours and here are my results:

Ink, watercolor, sketchbook

The building on the other side of the road from Coffeemania cafe, where we settled down (I finished drawing and added color at home).

Table things at the table where I drank my coffee and sketched.

As I do not feel enough confident to draw people in the cafe, I focused on the toy of the boy who was with our group.

And to continue the tradition, I want to share the link to talented Japanese watercolorist who lives in California, visit him at "Watercolors by Osamu"

This is my version of his monochrome painting, I think the original is so good in tone and composition.

These are wonderful and I can tell you are hungry for color - beautiful color work in these. I love the sketch crawl work, too - you are so brave going out and doing this (I've only sketched in public one time in a park and got so much attention, I didn't care for it much).

Edward, thank you so much! Sleep well! Here they decided to keep summer time zones forever and now we can not get up in the morning (because the darkness goes away at 9 and, accordingly, can not get to sleep before 2 am..). The idea was to remove the stress which time changing twice a year cause to people))Rhonda, thank you! I realized that when I was in group it was not scary at all. We looked so important, artists at work, people were appreciating)) But when I sketch alone.. I do scary serious face to hide how I am afraid of attention and possible critique.

Your sketches are all very interesting, no doubt about that! My favorite piece is the ink and color veggies.. your variety is one thing that baffles me and it reflects the passion and patience you have with in!

What a wonderful post, Irina! It was such a pleasure seeing all those different creations you made and you managed to put things so different in a way so harmonious, loved it! Lot of hugs from Anamaria